Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

Bryston City Nature Journal: Meet the eastern towhee

The eastern towhee is still referred to by many birders as the rufous-sided towhee, its former official common name. The male has a characteristic reddish patch beneath its black wing.
(Photo:
Elizabeth Ellison
,
Special to the Citizen-Times
)

A selection of bird essays by renowned ornithologist and artist George Miksch Sutton (1898-1982), founder of the Avian Research Center in Norman, Okla., was posthumously published in 1986 as “Birds Worth Watching.” I have always thought that was an excellent title.

It is one of my favorite bird books, and I recommend it to you. Therein, Sutton profiled 60 species of well-known birds in Oklahoma (most of which occur in Western North Carolina), focusing on his personal observations of habits and idiosyncrasies for each species.

That is, he wasn’t writing life histories, he was writing vignettes — trying to capture the essence of each bird in a few strokes.

It would take me awhile to compile a satisfactory list of 60 WNC birds worth watching. But I can name 10 or so off the top of my head that would have to be included: northern cardinal, tufted titmouse, Carolina and black-capped chickadees, dark-eyed junco, Carolina and winter wrens, white-breasted and red-breasted nuthatches, raven … and so on.

One bird I wouldn’t exclude is the eastern towhee. Many of you know it as the rufous-sided towhee, which used to be its official common name. In other parts of the country it is sometimes known as the “chewink.”

What are the towhee’s characteristic features? Well, they are dimorphic — which means you can easily distinguish the black-backed male from the brown-backed female. About a third of the bird population in WNC is dimorphic to a greater or lesser degree.

Year round, they communicate via a two-syllable call from which their names are derived: “tow-hee” or “che-wink.” During the breeding season, the male sings a song that sounds like: “drink-your-tea!” (High quality vocalizations with variations can be heard online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWVa08fpnXg.)

Towhees breed in disturbed areas grown over with shrubs and tangles as well as woodland edges, from the lowest into the higher elevations. They winter, for the most part, in the lower elevations.

They don’t often come to feeders but apparently enjoy being around the hustle and bustle created at feeding stations by cardinals, juncos, goldfinches, chickadees and similar species. They often hang out on the periphery of the feeding area, making occasional forays into the open area to blindside an unsuspecting junco or sparrow.

The most characteristic trait of the towhee is the manner in which it scratches in the leaf litter, locating insects. You often hear towhees before you see them. The technique is well-documented in ornithological literature.

The Birds of America Online, a subscription site sponsored by the American Ornithological Society and the Ornithology Lab at Cornell University, provides this brief account:

“[Towhees] commonly employ bilateral scratching with feet as means to displace loose debris on ground surface and uncover hidden invertebrate prey or seeds. Motor patterns in a single scratch sequence involve forward preparatory hop followed by a backward power hop during which both legs and feet are thrust synchronously backward, raking debris rearward, and then returned in time to catch bird in standing position.”

There is a remarkable video clip online (4 minutes long) that you really ought to take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMoyVxxTlOQ. It captures a male eastern towhee performing the two-legged back scratch in slow motion. Now, what could be better than that? You’ll never observe a towhee in quite the same way again.

The female towhee is attractive. The male is absolutely striking ... almost gaudy. As in Elizabeth’s rendering, reproduced here (and visible in color at CITIZEN-TIMES.com) there’s something stylish, almost Oriental, about his overall appearance. The black upperparts have a bluish sheen. The rufous sides resemble watercolor strokes. The red eyes are iridescent.

All in all, a bird worth watching.

George Ellison is a naturalist and writer. His wife, Elizabeth Ellison, is a watercolor artist and paper-maker who has a gallery-studio in Bryson City. Contact them at info@georgeellison.com or info@elizabethellisonwatercolors.com or write to P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, NC 28713.